McCarthy's underwhelming companion piece to The Passenger, set eight years earlier, in 1972, begins with a one-paragraph case file for 20-year-old PhD candidate Alicia Western. Alicia, who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has been dropped off at Stella Maris, a psychiatric hospital in rural Wisconsin, with over $40,000 in cash. What follows is a series of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, written like a play but with no exposition, stage directions, or dialogue tags. The subjects include mathematics, quantum mechanics, music theory, and obscure philosophy. Before Alicia arrived at Stella Maris, her Formula 1 driver brother, Bobby Western, had a crash during a race that put him into a coma. She's in love with Bobby, but refuses to talk about him with Cohen until the third act. There are scraps of humor ("Mathematics is ultimately a faith-based initiative. And faith is an uncertain business," Alicia tells Cohen), though not much tension, as the reader already knows how things will end (Alicia's body is discovered on the first page of The Passenger). McCarthy has swum in these waters before, and with more impressive strokes. Strangely, The Passenger offers a more successful ending to the story of Alicia and Bobby. Though this volume feels extraneous, McCarthy diehards will still flock to it. (Dec.)

In 1972, Alicia Western, a PhD candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, checks herself into Stella Maris, a psychiatric hospital in rural Wisconsin, with over $40,000 in cash. She is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The psychiatrist thinks she is there to talk about her decision to take her brother Bobby off life support. Instead, Alicia begins a meandering discussion about philosophy, mathematics, humanity, religion, ethics, and mental illness. McCarthy's companion novel to The Passenger is a gripping, thought-provoking look at what it means to be human. Narrators Julia Whelan and Edoardo Ballerini give stunning performances as Alicia and her psychiatrist. With a calm, measured tone, Ballerini provides stability, while Whelan embodies a troubled but brilliantly self-aware Alicia as she reveals shocking truths about her life. Listeners will be wholly drawn into Alicia's slippery story where the boundaries of truth and reality become blurred. The audio provides ambiance with well-placed sound effects, such as the clicking of the psychiatrist's tape recorder. VERDICT Libraries will want to purchase this piercing work, not only because of McCarthy's many fans, but also because the audiobook skillfully communicates the depth and beauty of his haunting story.--Elyssa Everling

A companion to McCarthy's The Passenger that both supplements and subverts it. Alice Western--now known as Alicia, her birth certificate changed via her brother's counterfeiter pal, John Sheddan--is a brilliant mathematician, at work on a doctorate even as a teenager. Her mind has melted, though. In this series of dialogues with a psychiatrist, she reveals herself to be thoroughly self-aware: "Mental illness is an illness. What else to call it? But it's an illness associated with an organ that might as well belong to Martians for all our understanding of it." Still, the seemingly very real friend she calls the Thalidomide Kid turns out to be one of many hallucinations that show up to keep Alicia company--an interesting turn, since it seems the Kid also visited her brother, Bobby, in the predecessor novel. Is Bobby's life also a hallucination, a dream? Perhaps, for Alicia suggests that Bobby may still be lying in a coma following an auto-racing accident in Italy. For Alicia, just 20 years old, mathematics is both a defense and a curse, something she's given up--not easily, for, as she tells Dr. Cohen, "I think maybe it's harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything." One thing that does seem to be uncomfortably real is her incestuous relationship with Bobby, which she reveals to Dr. Cohen in small, enigmatic bits seeded with defiant assertions that her conscience is untroubled: "I knew that I would love him forever. In spite of the laws of Heaven." Some of her defenses melt a little toward the end, when, having revealed some of the cracks in her psyche, she asks Dr. Cohen to hold her hand--because, McCarthy writes in a characteristically gnomic phrase, "that's what people do when they're waiting for the end of something." A grand puzzle, and grandly written at that, about shattered psyches and illicit dreams. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Schizophrenic genius and math prodigy Alicia Western, introduced in McCarthy's novel The Passenger (2022), in which she existed mainly on the periphery, here gets the starring role. Alicia has voluntarily admitted herself into Stella Maris, a facility for the care of psychiatric patients. Capable of understanding, even elucidating the most complex mathematical models, Alicia's brilliance remains undiminished, though her hallucinations have become more pronounced (the lead-in to each chapter in The Passenger describes a different hallucination of Alicia's). The format of Stella Maris is as bold as it is simple, consisting entirely of the conversations Alicia has with her doctor at the facility. Few authors would attempt to present the dialogue of a math genius, yet McCarthy clearly knows his way around Fermat's Theorem. McCarthy demonstrates a unique ability to discuss complex mathematical and philosophical content in literary prose that somehow braids the two cultures. Alicia is a complex and compelling character, who reminds us that the word prodigy comes from the Latin word for monster while she also plumbs her own subconscious. Pair with The Passenger for an optimal reading experience.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With the earlier release of McCarthy's The Passenger, readers will be primed for this related tale.